If you’re curious how the Steam Deck can play the game Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 then I can give you all the details in this article.
When we check the store page for Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 on Steam, the Steam Deck section tells us that the game is Playable. However, it is not labeled as Verified which is what most people look for when checking to see if a game plays well on the handheld console.
What Does Playable Mean?
Playable can mean lots of different things but overall, it tells us that the game loads up perfectly fine but it may require some manual tweaks before it runs well. This could be as simple as requiring the user select a community controller configuration or it could be as complex as digging around the Settings menu to change a specific graphics setting.
For this specific game, though, we’re told the following. . .
- Entering some text requires manually invoking the on-screen keyboard.
- Some in-game text is small and may be difficult to read.
And in my experience this is the case when trying to play the game on my Steam Deck OLED. I was able to install it just like any other game (even though I installed a copy from outside of Steam). I can even attest to the small text that appears on the screen. So while you may have to squint every now and then, the game is actually able to play perfectly fine.
Although, when checking the protondb website and following the link to its Open Issue page on GitHub we can see there were some other issues when the game first launched. So far from my research I have discovered that Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 did seem to have a multiplayer issue when playing it on a PC or the Steam Deck with Proton.
There are reports that the game had the following issues. . .
- Does not connect to the internet to upload your game stats to its online leaderboards
- Does not connect to either multiplayer challenges or lobbies.
- Create-A-Park is full of bugs.
I do say “had” because while there were some unofficial patches made available to the community for a couple of these issue, they have been fixed with the latest version of Proton (as of writing this). The same can be said for the bugs that had been reported with the Create-A-Park mode as well.
There still seems to be reports from select users who say they were unable to get the game to open at all (even though it installs successfully). But these are far and few in between. With the majority of the community with Proton v8.0-3 installed.
Gameplay on Steam Deck
Here I have a video of me playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 on my Steam Deck OLED so you can get an idea as to how the game performs.
VIDEO
brief overview. . .
Performance on Steam Deck
You shouldn’t need to adjust the graphical presets of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 on Steam Deck. The auto detection feature works really well to configure the settings on its own. There are multiple reports of people getting 60FPS while playing. If your ambient temperature is on the warm side then you could get results like some others are reporting with the frames per second hitting sixty during most gameplay. But then dropping down to mid-to-low 50s in certain sections.
You could also go into the Graphic Settings area to adjust the presets though. Then drop a few options (like Shadows or something) to make sure you get the game pegged at 60 frames per second 100% of the time.
Conclusion
I was not happy with the exclusivity deal Epic Games signed to get this game on their storefront. I certainly understand Epic’s motivation here but it is so very difficult for me to spend money in the Epic Game Store when they are missing so many QoL features compared to Steam.
To make matters worse, the Steam Deck is likely going to cement that mindset for myself and so many others, too. At least it will unless Epic Games is able to reach feature parity with Steam while also offering some integration options.